There’s some really interesting commentary here, but I have a hard time stomaching the smugness!

“Everything today is a lame imitation of the things I grew up with! Kids these days are terrible because they have politics but no religion. Now let me tell you about my vastly superior spiritual atheism and politics!”

Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically
programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and
ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness. Society is not the
enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman’s protection against rape. Feminism, with
its solemn Carry Nation repressiveness, does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element
in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape. Women who do not understand rape
cannot defend themselves against it.

Shuddup, everyone! Camille Paglia’s my babe. I’ve been a fan of hers for years. You have to look at her entire body of work to understand the way she thinks. Feminists don’t like her because she believes that women really can make their own career choices, even if it’s not politically correct. She doesn’t automatically brand the so-called male gaze as a reason to go home and cry in the shower.

I’ve never met anyone with whom I’ve agreed completely, but overall character is more important.
And she has really soft hands.

The traction that Trump has made with some of the Republican party members is not funny, as it is scary. In Toronto, we were afflicted with Rob Ford for four years. I did not believe that he would get elected based a number of stories that came out prior to the election, that showed him to be a liar and a bully.

He was able to convince a majority of a minority of voters to vote for him.

She insists that the left must shake off the sterility of postmodern deconstruction and re-engage with art, with passion, and with the language contained in the vernacular of talkback radio.

In the production line of books asking “Whither to the left?” steadily rolling out of publishing houses now, people have claimed the right has captured almost everything - money, morality, religion and war, elitists and battlers, the rich and the rednecks.

But passion? Art? Has the right really claimed this too?

It’s a bold call, but an enticing one, if simply for the reason that something must be done about the deadly dull spectacle of modern politics, the lack of spirit in the rhetoric, and the steamrolled political personalities. What better way to erode democracy than to dull our senses?

Australians respond much better to passion than to earnestness.

Paglia has said some strange and mad things over the past few years, and she frequently exaggerates for dramatic effect. She paints all universities as hopelessly stale, elite and still in the thrall of French post-structuralists. She also stereotypes artists as only creating dark, agonising films for people who vote the same way, leaving it to people like Mel Gibson to make the grand, soul-stirring epics people hanker for.

“The age of the avant-garde is over!” Paglia cried, thumping the lectern as people cheered. “All this hip cynical posing is over!” The hip Paglia is only cynical about people she disagrees with. She declared she felt “closer as a secular humanist to evangelicals than to the elite professors of universities”. Strange bedfellows for a lesbian libertarian, but she says this is because they are passionate about the Bible, its stories and its meaning, and directly engage with it.

At least one Democratic public intellectual can’t see Hillary Clinton as our next president. Camille Paglia, who refers to herself as a “libertarian,” has some surprising insights into the 2016 election - and Benghazi.

As a registered Democrat

She’s in love with the Right and their talk-radio rhetoric. She enjoys everything that the left is not. She revels in the Sarah Palins and in the hatemongers. She gets to be the token “Liberal” who goes on interviews to trash the left from the position of the right-winger.

I can’t say agree with everything she says, but certainly respect her for calling out the bullshit artists that generally reside there.

She’s a horrible example of the bullshit artist that resides in academia and endorses/embraces the right-wing noise machine’s rhetoric, so there’s some serious blind spot going on here.

Eksrae:

Shuddup, everyone! Camille Paglia’s my babe. I’ve been a fan of hers for years. You have to look at her entire body of work to understand the way she thinks. Feminists don’t like her because she believes that women really can make their own career choices, even if it’s not politically correct. She doesn’t automatically brand the so-called male gaze as a reason to go home and cry in the shower.

I’ve been Poe’d, I’m sure of it.

She’s a creature of contrarianism, take away the D registration and what difference would you have between her speeches and anything else coming out of Fox News?

I always assumed that the poorly handled “Ask A Wingnut” column was ghostwritten by her.

Her “controversial” views are the mainstream right, puppeteered through a “liberal ivory tower” speaker. The framework hasn’t changed, the message is the same, the antifeminist rantings couched as feminism.

It’s mind-boggling how someone could consider the message fresh and exciting, but I suppose there remain plenty of registered Democrats who aren’t progressive towards womens’ rights.

"This gender myopia, this gender monomania, has become a disease," says the author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn.

So what does Paglia think of contemporary culture, with its openness to a wide variety of ever-proliferating gender, racial, and sexual identities?

Not much.

“I do not feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life,” Paglia tells Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie. “This gender myopia, this gender monomania, has become a disease. It’s become a substitute for religion. It is impossible that the feminist agenda can ever be the total explanation of human life.”